LeanKit: Reducing costs while delivering more value

Tableau: What does LeanKit do?Stephen Franklin, CTO: LeanKit is a SaaS product: we provide our customers with a way to visualize the workflow and manage work visually through that process.

Tableau: And how does Tableau fit into this?Stephen: Where we're taking the Tableau platform, integrated within LeanKit, is really building out powerful tools that allow our customer organizations to unleash the value of the data that we're collecting through the everyday processes that we provide through our tooling.

Having the ability through an OEM partnership to both embed and provide custom reporting for our customers is something that's been very exciting for them.

Tableau: How so?Stephen: Companies and customers are making very important business decisions that shape the way and the direction that their organization is going.

If you're not confident in that data—or if you're making those decisions on invalid data—that actually could do more damage to you than actually not having that data in the first place.

Tableau: Why did you decide to change from building your own analytics solution to buying Tableau?Stephen: What Tableau does is allows us to quickly iterate, change, test, and experiment with different ways that we want to look at the data, different calculations that we want to perform on the data.

And it's so easy with, you know, with very little investment that you have to roll back to do those experimentations and quickly come to the solution that you really want.

Being able to do that rapid development allows us to do those experiments without repercussions of burning up all our development hours.

We kind of all fell in love with Tableau from the get-go.

We actually had originally built our own analytics package within our system. We were limited by the amount of development resources that we were able to devote to that.

One of the things that we really like about Tableau is so much of that is already built into the tool and allows us to leverage that with zero development effort and just some experts that understand how to do that in Tableau.

Tableau: What has the result been? What is the impact of making that switch?Stephen: So, it's definitely been freeing, and it's allowed us to do more and better things on top of our data that we really would not have even tried—because it would have been far too risky for us to do that or spend that development dollar.

The most enjoyable piece of the relationship between LeanKit and Tableau has been the excitement that people get when we're able to take data that has been sort of loosely coupled and very hard to understand, and really turn it into a visualization that people can process and gain value from.

Tableau: Can you tell us about the decision process?Stephen: We needed a tool that provided a lot of flexibility because we serve so many different verticals—everybody wants to look at their data in a little bit different fashion.

And we were looking for a product that provided a maximum level of power and minimized our development effort. Basically, allow us to deliver more value to the customer.

Tableau: What are you currently doing with Tableau?

So many of our customers are already Tableau customers. So it's a very good synergy between the two organizations and the partnership. It’s very nice to see our customers, our large customers get very excited by the fact that we're actually moving to Tableau.

Stephen Franklin,CTO

Stephen: We're currently in the process of integrating Tableau into LeanKit. It's been a very smooth process. We're supporting over 350,000 users. We're securing their data and only allowing, you know, customers to access the data that they have rights to access.

So many of our customers are already Tableau customers. So it's a very good synergy between the two organizations and the partnership. It’s very nice to see our customers, our large customers get very excited by the fact that we're actually moving to Tableau.